Advanced Regression for Causal Inference

IS 5150/6110

Who am I?

  • Studied journalism, international relations, and statistics
  • Studied international political economy
  • Worked in marketing research
  • Studied quantitative marketing
  • Eight years teaching at BYU
  • Second semester teaching at Utah State
  • Rachel teaches high school English
  • Four kids aged 7 to 17
  • Once compared by a student to “a nerdy Spider-Man villain”

Who are you?

  1. What program are you in?
  2. Why are you interested in causal inference?
  3. What’s your dream job?
  4. What’s one unique thing about you?

What is this class?

  • Correlation isn’t causation
  • Lack of correlation isn’t lack of causation
  • All supervised models predict, some are interpretable, fewer still are causal
  • A causal (not “casual”) model is needed for intervention and counterfactuals
  • Experimental and observational data
  • Project-based to build a portfolio
  • Proposed a form of this class a year ago
  • Updated proposal with new data
  • Class size lets us run a seminar

github.com/marcdotson/causal-inference